Franz Boas measured skulls to prove head shape was not a racial constant
Race scientists of the late 19th century treated skull shape as a fixed racial marker. Franz Boas, a physicist turned anthropologist, measured skeletons and showed that head size and shape shifted with health and nutrition. It was one blow in a lifelong campaign to put culture, not biology, at the centre of human difference.
Boas was born on 9 July 1858 in Minden, Westphalia. His grandparents were observant Jews, but his parents embraced Enlightenment ideals and disliked dogma of any kind; he recalled a home where the ideals of the 1848 revolution were alive, and a mother who founded the town's kindergarten. His uncle by marriage, Abraham Jacobi, a friend of Karl Marx, advised him throughout his career. Boas never converted to Christianity nor called himself a religious Jew.
He earned a doctorate in physics in 1881 while also studying geography. An expedition to northern Canada drew him to the language and culture of the Baffin Island Inuit, and he went on to fieldwork among peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Emigrating to the United States in 1887, he first curated museum collections at the Smithsonian, then in 1899 was made professor of anthropology at Columbia, where he stayed for good.
His ideas overturned the field. He rejected the fashionable evolutionary scheme that ranked societies on a ladder with Western Europe at the top, arguing that cultures develop through contact and the spread of ideas, not towards ever higher forms. He championed cultural relativism, the view that cultures cannot be objectively ranked because everyone judges through their own learned norms, and argued that behaviour differs between groups mainly because of social learning. He also combined archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology and linguistics into the four-field model that dominated American anthropology in the 20th century.
His greatest multiplier was teaching. His students founded departments across the country, and they included Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston and the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. Remembered as the father of American anthropology, he died on 21 December 1942.
Source: Franz Boas
